Local administration in early recovery forum

Development in Syria has suffered from many problems that are not hidden from anyone interested in development and Syrian affairs. These problems are inherent in the Syrian development model and are not only the result of the war. Some of them are related to the development planning model, some are related to the management of the development process itself and its distribution among regions, and some are related to social carriers and the extent of their involvement in development efforts, all of which constitute one of the most important internal roots of the Syrian war.

After the calming of the fighting fronts and the relief responses that accompanied the military operations, the reality today indicates a general consensus on the necessity of a preliminary phase after the relief phase, called according to post-conflict literature the “early recovery phase.” This phase aims primarily to protect Syrian society from slipping and returning to a state of open conflict and intractability, so as not to increase the risk of actual division and complete collapse of the state. It also protects against the return of the spread of the threat of terrorism and its spread at the regional level, and the increase in waves of asylum, and helps it build the necessary components and introductions for a political solution.

Hence, building stability at the local community level imposes itself as the most logical strategy capable of proposing solutions to build peace and prevent the return of conflict. Since the treatments constitute different models for the solution at the local level, it was necessary to read these models and attempt to build integration between them in stages, as they will later constitute inputs for the final political solution, without neglecting the necessity that they respond in their entirety to the deep factors that led to repeated cycles of violence in Syria’s history, which were based primarily on a trinity: monopoly of decision-making, its centralization, and social fragmentation. Therefore, any response will pass through 3 basic approaches: participation; decentralization; and national reconciliation, through the following basic approaches:

• Rebuilding social relations : that were destroyed as a result of the war and strengthening community value chains.

• Building trust in decision-making systems : Which makes these systems more capable of making decisions in a way that expresses local needs.

• Rebuilding the economic relations system: To enhance economic value chains, achieve an appropriate level of employment, enhance small investments and mitigate their risks.

• Development of the administrative and financial system:   To comply with the requirements of restoring these relationships.

• Agree on a political framework:   It consolidates and regulates these relationships.

Hence, the search for a way to spare the country future tragedies requires exploiting the available and urgent opportunity to invest in civil society as a flexible carrier close to the people and their problems, and as a new and old activist in society capable of playing a role distinct from the parties to the conflict, and strengthening its role in a way that achieves the empowerment of local communities and the strengthening of local administration because these are preconditions for early and sustainable social recovery and the return of refugees and internally displaced persons.

Therefore, two basic points cannot be ignored:

-        The need for local communities for development, not only because of the consequences of the war, but also because of the gaps in development planning over the years preceding the war.

-        The local administration system is the governing system available for development planning.

Here, recovery efforts can form a fundamental pillar for balanced and sustainable local development as a means of breaking through the impasse and building an initial understanding on the path to reconciliation and integration between national components. It can overcome the state of paralysis that the country is going through, starting from local communities, by developing the governance system in these communities.

In light of the above, the Nation Building Movement has focused since last year on searching for the decentralization and local administration policies necessary for the early recovery phase. During this period, it worked on studying the reality of local communities when entering the recovery phase in various regions with the aim of identifying the opportunities and challenges of moving to this phase, its features from the point of view of local communities, and how to activate work on it in partnership between civil society and local administration.

In parallel, the movement also worked on analyzing the legislative environment regulating decentralization and local administration by reviewing no less than 17 laws that are most closely related to the work of local administration at the local, regional and national levels. During this review, it built a matrix of principles, functions, mechanisms and indicators for reading the laws, distributed over five pillars: social - economic - administrative - financial - political. After that, it worked on comparing the outputs of the legal analysis with the outputs of the local sessions.